Novice Member

Hi champs,
I need your help in choosing a new Plasma TV for our living room (we will move our old one a Panasonic TH-37PE55E up to the guest room).
Even so HD etc. is somehow standard these days, we still use an SD DVB-S STB (Topfield 5000er) and continue to consume 90% SD TV signal (Free TV over here in Europe) with standard resolution (PAL SD i.e. 720/704 x 576) and a mixture of aspect ratio of 4:3 and 16:9.

So, we kind of liked the picture quality of the old Plasam, even the native resolution of the TH-37PE55E is only 842x480, but IMHO Panasonic did some very good scaling algorithm to fit SD 4:3 very nicely on the 16:9 screen, and some good ways of automatically switching between 4:3 and 16:9 without too much trouble.

Now we are thinking about the following 2 Plasmas from Panasonic:
TX-P42X50E with a native resolution of 1366x768 (kind of 720p)
TX-P42UT50E with a native resolution of 1920x1080 (kind of 1080i)
As you can see, we are looking more in the budget level, but reading through the reviews, it looks like both Plasmas are not too bad at all.

However now we are unsure which TV would provide a better quality, based on our consumption behavior (primarily TV SD signals!).
Which one does the scaling/ fitting better? IMHO the TX-P42UT50E might be able to simply 2x the pixel of a 4:3 SD signal and fit it fully on screen (black bars on both sides), but not sure if that is the right way, will be done like that.

Active Member

Hi, I own a 1080p vt20 panasonic plasma as well as the 42x50 panasonic plasma you are thinking of getting. They both have great scaling but i can say for sure that the x50 at it's lower resolution makes dvd's and normal SD tv shows look much nicer than a 1080p panel does. I have compared the same dvd's on both. The x50 also looks great with 1080 content either blu-ray or HD tv but obviously not as great as they look on a 1080p screen. The x50 has accurate colors, good gamma and greyscale in the 'true cinema' picture setting, which is the one to use for the best picture quality. It has no picture issues when watching football or other fast content. If SD if your thing then the x50 is a bargain with a picture quality that makes a mockery of the price it sells for. Just so you know the resolution of the x50 is actually 1024 x 768. Whether in 4:3 or 16:9 selectable via the aspect ratio button on the remote the scaling is excellent.